Posts by author
Michael Berger
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Tandem Reading
I’m a huge fan of tandem reading: reading two books at a time, one of which is usually a novel, the other of which is usually a book of stories, essays, poems, fragments or lyric randomness. I find the dialogue…
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Action! Violence! Jilted Lovers! Pulp History!
David Talbot, former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, came into Red Hill Books recently to drop off his latest creation, Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story Of The Man Who Saved America, one of the first installments in the Pulp History series…
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Margaret Atwood’s Unusual Book Tour
Here’s something I missed from earlier this month: Margaret Atwood took her recent dystopian novel, The Year Of The Flood on the road with thespians, activists and a documentary film team! Personally, I think book tours should integrate as many…
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Drunk Book Buying
“The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the…
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Travelling With Tintin
Although I didn’t read them as a kid, I love the idea that Tintin comics, in the era before television, could act as travelogues for people curious about the world — and that they were pretty accurate, most of the…
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More Literary Trading Cards!
I grew up collecting baseball cards. They were my first passion. It was an exciting hobby because every pack initiated a quest. It wasn’t that I cared much for the game but I was just an inveterate collector, especially of…
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Towel-Snapping The Janitor’s Ass
“C: Where did the idea [for The Instructions] come from? AL: Nowhere really, unless maybe from the sentence “I towel-snapped the ass of the Janitor,” which used to be the first line of the book. Or from having spent my…
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Sesame Street In Nigeria
“In a country with a population of over 150 million — where, according to the CIA World Factbook, nearly half are under the age of 14 — the show will address some of the biggest challenges faced by young people…
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A World I Don’t Recognize
“If you were to send the 16th edition back to 2003, when the 15th edition came out, it would read like science fiction. Here’s a taste. The words ‘electronic,’ ‘software,’ ‘technologies,’ ‘computing’ and ‘website’ all appear in the preface of…
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E.B. White’s Essays
“Some writers shame and immobilize me with their brilliance, while others, like Twain, de Vries and Spark dwarf my own efforts but inspire me to keep on. It’s hard to pinpoint what separates the two groups; if pressed I’d say…
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Maud Newton Ecstatic About The Paris Review
Maud Newton’s enthusiasm is always infectious — and a few days ago she celebrated in glowing terms the most recent issue of The Paris Review, the first with its new editor, Lorin Stein.
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A Dangerous Time For Writers
“If your task is to push out the boundaries, and open up the universe, you cannot do that by sitting safely in the middle of the room. If you want to push out the borders, you have to actually go…